Iceberg Interactive has today announced that its upcoming 4X turn-based strategy videogame, Horizon, has reached the beta milestone on Steam. Horizon, created by Toronto-based developer L3O Interactive, launches players into a universe of galactic exploration and conquest, as they take mankind on its first journey into deep space, taking gamers beyond the known horizon.

Spending around ten weeks at the Alpha stage on the Steam Early Access program allowed L3O Interactive to gather lots of gamer feedback resulting in the addition of many new improvements and enhancements. A list of the notable changes is detailed below.

“We are very excited with Horizon‘s development, having moved to the next stage!” says Raffi Parsekhian, CEO at L3O Interactive. “The feedback from our early adopters has been terrific and while we have integrated many great suggestions already, we want to continue on this path during beta on Steam’s Early Access program. Horizon already offers a compelling 4X experience and we are looking forward to enhancing it further as it continues to evolve with the help of 4x strategy gamers.”

Horizon has been in development for several years, with L3O Interactive aiming for a 2013 release. Electronic Theatre will keep you updated with all the latest details on Horizon and other forthcoming titles from Iceberg Interactive.

Most notable changes in the alpha-to-beta upgrade launching today:

A more challenging game experience:
- A.I. now dynamically adjusts its aggressiveness against the player
- A.I. now plans and executes various military actions with the help of an overall mastermind, several types of tacticians and a fleet coordinator
- Improved path finding for ships
- A more balanced game economy and colony population rates
- Colony management will now require more decision-making and allow for specialized worlds

Other changes and additions:
- A race report view has been added that keeps a history of major events relating to the race
- Additional story missions have been added
- 12 new Human ship designs added
- Improved UI and higher resolution animation scenes
- Galaxy generation with many more stars for bigger and longer gameplay sessions
- Many fixes and better handling of non-standard windows system configurations
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